Monday, 16 December 2013

Final renders from the vehicle project. Would have liked to spend a bit more time on the environment in this one. Lightmaps in Max are no fun at all. Pretty happy with the results though, but the screenshots don't really do the materials any justice, will post a quick turnaround below

Sunday, 24 November 2013

Monday, 11 November 2013

I'm aiming to create a vehicle that might exist within the futuristic Latin America setting I spoke about in the last post.

Going from these previous sketch I wanted to create some kind of surveillance/crowd control system that would operate in the slums

These are along the lines I'm thinking for the final design. An unmanned riot control vehicle, using non lethal systems like smoke grenades, rubber bullets and LRAD to disorientate/disperse crowds. Will post some more on this soon

Concept art and Design is going to be the main focus for my FMP. I want to spend the majority of my time working up to and building a design orientated 2D portfolio, perhaps with a smaller 3D scene to solidify these ideas, and produce a book as a presentable portfolio piece.

I'm going to focus on creating an entire scenario that will encompass environment and set design, vehicles and characters, even down to smaller details like scene props.

Currently I'm thinking of setting my sights on a futuristic interpretation of Latin America, with themes of overpopulation, a big divide between the rich and the poor, and a heavy police presence.

I explored some of these ideas over summer, which has led me to the current themes...

I'm fairly happy with the atmosphere of the scene, and think i somewhat captured the essence of the concepts. The layout is interesting, it has a nice flow, but the general clutter in the level is lacking. It could do with more attention to detail, whether it's decals or random rubbish scattered around just to make it feel more lived in.

Sunday, 27 October 2013

I decided to model my scene with modular parts, that way I could build on a larger scale and still have detail and variation, but it's only really taken until now to really start to form.

The scene is coming together relatively quickly now, even though it's taken me so long to get there, but I think that's a result of the modular pipeline.

I also spent a good deal of time on the textures, I pretty much baked from high poly or sculpted the majority of what's in the scene, no matter how large or small. Whilst it is more time consuming, I felt it necessary because the textures will just have that much more fidelity, especially when scaled down to accommodate for the texture budget, and hey, it's a good learning experience. As was my choice to use UDK.

I do kind of regret choosing UDK over Cry in the end. It's taking a long time and it's quite frustrating to use, and I feel I need to spend a lot more time on my 2D this year, this just feels like it's holding me back so much.

Monday, 7 October 2013

Started rooftop this week, I've chosen to loosely base my level on Kowloon Walled City in China (that has since been knocked down...)

Some initial mood concepts trying out different colour palettes and compositions. I'd like to push the lighting quite a lot in this, playing on the idea that people live where they work and everything is constantly bustling and very busy.

Reference moodboards.

Initially I wanted to make it hyper futuristic but thought it might end up more work than it's worth for the 4 week project, and I also want to reserve some ideas for my FMP!
I want to focus mainly on 2D this year, which might end up being counter productive but I really want to build up a solid portfolio.

I'm feeling really apprehensive about starting 3D again, especially as I've chosen to try and use UDK for this project. Last year we obviously did the off the map project using Cryengine, which I'm really comfortable with, but figured I should learn as much as I can whilst I can. UDK is going to be a challenge, and I'm already wishing I chose Cryengine.

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Wednesday, 21 August 2013

If anything, I'm learning to push myself into paintings and make them work instead of getting disheartened and starting again. Rushed these out in about 2-3 days, so they don't have the strongest designs, but I'm fairly happy with the compositions...

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

This week I focused on putting together a single environment that I could take a bit further with detailing.
I spend a lot of time at the thumbnail stage trying to find an interesting composition, this usually just involves throwing down random shapes till I see something I like, and then work it through the fundamentals, applying perspective, using the rule of thirds, repeating shapes and working on value and atmospherics.

With this piece I explored and ended up deviating from the initial sketch, in fig 2, and it led me to a bit of frustration as to "why" it wasn't working. Ended up taking a step back realising that all the interest and energy was in that first thumb, so I stuck with it.

I settled on the idea of these slum like settlements below a huge futuristic city. It definitely helped to give the whole piece a huge sense of scale, with all these tiny rooftops scattering into the distance